Swim

Happy New Year!  I think I’ve got the blog organized to the point where I can start making regular posts.  There will be lots of tweaking as time goes on, but let’s get started.

I began sewing in junior high school.  My Mom and Grandmother were both accomplished sewers, knitters and needle-pointers, so it was no surprise that I carried on with fabric-type crafts.  I took home ec in high school and remember being called to the office to explain why my flannelette had hockey players on it, instead of fairies, princesses or other more feminine designs.  Dare to be different, think outside the box – both describe my persona.

This seems to have carried over to my new love of quilting.  I want to use my imagination to create and don’t want to be restricted to a pattern.  The quilt in the photos above was the sixth that I’ve made.  I swim a lot in a pool.  One day, while doing laps, I realized that the tiles on the bottom of the pool were laid out just like a quilt.  I began collecting blue fabrics with a watery look.  Armed with a large sheet of graph paper, a metre stick and some coloured pencils I drew up a scale version of three lanes of a swimming pool, complete with lane dividers.

The fabric was cut into 2 1/2″ squares, sewn together into rows and then the rows were joined together.  It didn’t look like much for a long time, but gradually it began to look like what I’d envisioned.  I added a white border, used a mixed blue backing and a black binding.  It’s machine quilted with a horizontal wavy pattern.

I think this is my favourite quilt so far because it is an own-design that reflects my love of sewing and swimming.  It’s very different and definitely outside the box!